Ruth Padel
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‘Music of the Republic’: a poem by Ruth Padel
Music of the Republic You were with him in his final hours… Carolyn Forché, ‘Last Bridge’ Plato put a spell on you from the beginning. There were other stars buzzing about your brain which will soon be donated to science but he was the one who carried you over the…
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Two poems by Ruth Padel
This month Ruth Padel presents a major new work, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life, published in the 250th year of Beethoven’s birth. Below are two poems from it. Idealising the Unattainable Can Begin Very Early ‘Little Louis clung with great affection to his grandfather. Though he lost him so…
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Tidings by Ruth Padel
The Voice of Silence I am the oldest angel, the dark side of the brain. Everything untold, suppressed, unseemly or wild is under my protection. I am Charoum, Angel of Silence. I am the seed of fire in a hearth you thought was cold, the stillness when you step into moonlit snow and who you…
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Thaddeus O’Sullivan – ‘The Poetry of Making a Film’
Thaddeus O’Sullivan, edited by Ruth Padel Ruth: This essay sprang from a film-maker’s notes about directing. It has been written up by a poet eager to understand and is based on a conversation the two of us had, at a POETRY AND event, in King’s College Chapel, on St Patrick’s Day 2016. Thaddeus O’Sullivan is…
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Sushrut Jadhav: Connecting, Belonging and a Clean New Music
Ruth Padel In The Art of Writing, written in the 3rd century AD, the Chinese poet Lu Ji wrote about strategies for finding words which seem “to belong with each other”. In 1942, in a key passage of Little Gidding reflecting his experience as air-raid warden in the London blitz, T.S. Eliot embellishes and embodies…
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The Hand of Art – Czesław Miłosz: Form, Communication and Reality
Ruth Padel: It was a great pleasure, this May, to go to the 4th Miłosz Festival, in honour of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most iconic poets, in Kraków, the city to which Czesław Miłosz returned at the end of his life, and an enormous honour to give this lecture there, the very…